augustjackson dot net

In preparation for my presentation on RSS at the SLA 2009 conference I created a set of screencasts of simple RSS workflows.  These workflows are very simple and straightforward.

This is the most simple workflow for finding RSS feeds for standard sources such as on-line publications and blogs:

Next I demonstrate the simplicity of creating a custom RSS feed using search.  In this case I want to ride the coattails of Twitter and demonstrate the potential for custom RSS feeds based on Twitter searches to give you near real-time tracking of company reputation or tracking of developing events.

One of the reasons I am such a big fan of Google Reader is the ease with which users can share the items that they find interesting (witness the ever-changing list of my latest shared items from Google Reader that graces the right side of this very blog).  For the information professional this ease has real potential to facilitate team collaboration on research projects or create information products such as corporate news portals.

I’m not entirely thrilled with the video quality of the screencasts as they made their way from Quicktime files on my Mac to flash-based videos on YouTube.  Your viewing experience will be improved if you expand the video to full screen.

A week from this coming Monday I will be reprising my presentation on how competitive intelligence professionals can best use RSS as a low-cost method to cast a wide research network.  I’ve tried to update the material to discuss the potential of Twitter to track sentiment, issues and breaking events in near real-time.

I’ve also updated the material to highlight one of my favorite features of Google Reader: the ease with which users can share news items of interest, and how the RSS feed of a user’s shared items can simplify collaboration and publishing of relevant news items.  Anybody who is tracking my shared Google Reader items will quickly see that I am a promiscuous sharer of items related to telecom, competitive intelligence, technology, politics, economics and other topics.  Between this and Twitter this blog has really become more of an aggregation point for me (and I suppose my Facebook page functions in a similar way) than a site for which I write frequently (and never as frequently as I would like).

As much as I think Google Reader is a great tool and the best RSS aggregator around, there is one feature that is sorely missing.  The SmartList feature in NetNewsWire (a Macintosh RSS reader) is a sophisticated way to filter all of the news items in your RSS aggregator based on the occurrence of key words that the user defines, including with some Boolean functionality.

Feel free to take a look at my slides and let me know what you think.  I would actually appreciate feedback in the next few days that might help me deliver an even better presentation to the SLA audience.